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Fly Free
"None of Shari's brothers experience the cruel words and physical abuse she gets from her mother even though she does her best to be a good girl. Her mother expects her to take care of her little brother. Well, Shari loves him enough not to mind that responsibility, but when he gets in trouble her mother blames her. Her only escape is the woods and the birds! As secrets in her life are revealed, Shari finds a friend, an older woman who is also a bird lover. Would Shari be better off living with her friend?"
160 pages, Paperback
First published March 23, 1984
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
C.S. Adler
53 books22 followersC.S. (Carole) Adler moved to Tucson, Arizona, after spending most of her life in upstate New York. She was an English teacher at Niskayuna Middle School for nearly a decade. She is a passionate tennis player, grandmother, and nature lover, and has been a full-time writer since the publication of her first book,The Magic of the Glits, in 1979. That book won both the William Allen White Award and the Golden Kite Award.
Her bookThe Shell Lady’s Daughter was chosen by the A.L.A. as a best young adult book of l983. With Westie and the Tin Man won the Children’s Book Award of the Child Study Committee in l986, and that committee has commended many of Adler’s books. Split Sisters in l987 and Ghost Brother in 1991 were I.R.A. Children’s Choices selections. One Sister Too Many was on the 1991 Young Adults’ Choices list. Always and Forever Friends and Eddie’s Blue Winged Dragon were on a 1991 I.R.A. 99 Favorite Paperbacks list.
Many of her books have been on state lists and have also been published in Japan, Germany, England, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, and France.
Her bookThe Shell Lady’s Daughter was chosen by the A.L.A. as a best young adult book of l983. With Westie and the Tin Man won the Children’s Book Award of the Child Study Committee in l986, and that committee has commended many of Adler’s books. Split Sisters in l987 and Ghost Brother in 1991 were I.R.A. Children’s Choices selections. One Sister Too Many was on the 1991 Young Adults’ Choices list. Always and Forever Friends and Eddie’s Blue Winged Dragon were on a 1991 I.R.A. 99 Favorite Paperbacks list.
Many of her books have been on state lists and have also been published in Japan, Germany, England, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, and France.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 9, 2022
A book for girls with abusive mothers. And, a book for those awful, imbecilic people who assume a particular woman they know would never abuse her kids and try to convince the victim of their abuser's undying "LOVE" for them.
Let me tell you something, credulous people with a need to believe in the infalliability of mothers: you are complicit in the abuse of their children when you refuse to entertain the possibility that the friendly woman who makes you feel nice about yourself or somehow reassured that the world isn't a terrible place or something, isn't an manipulative, two-faced, lying psychopath at home. (A big F U to every "well-meaning" brainless twit who has told an abused child that their mother "really loves them, trust me". You don't know anything aside from what you already want to perceive, coupled with the image that the mother wants you to see, and, not coincidentally, that mother can tell you're ready and willing to see only the good, to believe she's a saint, long-suffering saint with awful children that she loves anyway, while later the same day she finds new ways to physically, emotionally and sometimes sexually torture her kids on the high she got pulling the wool over your fool eyes. You are COMPLICIT in that abuse, if you reassure her kids that she loves them. You cannot actually know if she does or if she just pretends to when people are present. Know that.).
Wow, I needed to vent that. And maybe you needed to read that.
Too many people assume a friendly woman = a good and loving mother. THERE IS NO SUCH EQUIVALENCY, AND YOU SHOULD NEVER MAKE SUCH A FOOLISH ASSUMPTION. Only the child knows. You don't. Psychopaths can spot a warm-hearted, naive patsy a mile away. Do the children of the world a favour - ask yourself if you're that patsy. Are you too willing to believe that you don't know a mother who extinguishes cigarettes on their child's skin in places you don't see? Who locks them out of the house at night to fend for themselves, to teach them a lesson? Who slanders them and ruins their reputation to all and sundry? Who can't stand to see the child feel happy? Secure? Comfortable? Confident? These mothers exist. Ask me how I know.
C. S. Adler must've known one or two of them, too, when she wrote this. It's not a great book, to be honest - it takes awhile to get going, and I found her scene setting to be lacking (I'm big on that, though). Lots of awful typos like "story" for 'store', and missing quotation marks, and question marks where other punctuation would have made more sense. Characters are pretty flat, though Charlotte hits virtually all of the high notes of a stereotypical abusive mother.
Shari is the eldest of four children, all the rest boys, and lives in rural Vermont with her young and maladjusted high-school drop-out mother, Charlotte, who had 3 kids before she was 20; and their long-haul trucking absentee father, Zeke. Shari has no friends. Shari has no pets (Charlotte set free Shari's parakeet - Charlotte doesn't like animals). Shari spends most of her time babysitting her youngest brother, 6 year old Petey (Pete). In fact, 13 year old Shari is functionally his ersatz mother, even charged with helping him to urinate cleanly into the toilet. Much is expected of lonely, shy, friendless Shari, who her hateful loser mother refers to as "Shari Ape Face" while she harrangues and berates her into doing the majority of the household chores. Charlotte hasn't a single redeeming quality.
And back to my big F U to the well-meaning, kind-hearted accomplice, who (hopefully) knows not the immense damage they cause, here's lovely Mabel, the local grocer. A nice lady, but a moron:
Where do people like Mabel come from? Who knows. But a further passage helped give me pause for thought. More from Mabel:
How about mother Charlotte, again?
Here's Shari's mother, speaking to Shari, about her pregnancy with Shari:
Mrs. Wallace, a widowed grandmother living on her own in a cabin up a mountainous backroad, soon becomes Shari's best friend (her words. Her only friend, as it happens, but she's not a bad choice at all). This is who she runs to, though is smart enough to hide out in the woods for several hours, first. Mrs. Wallace is a fellow bird-lover, and is observational in many ways:
I have immense gratitude that people like Mrs. Eve Wallace exist in the world. They only make the Charlotte-types angry, though, and annoy the Mabel-types who avoid allllll confrontation and unpleasantness, even if it means children are abused. Mabel is a coward. Society needs less Mabels. The Mabels of society help shelter the Charlottes, who, of course, wouldn't get away with it, were it not for the Mabels. Don't be a Mabel.
I feel like this review has gotten much more personal than it needed to be, but it was that sort of book - not a good one, but maybe an important one. The right book for an abused girl. I wish I had read it at Shari's age, anyway.
I would just like to close by saying no baby is capable of being cold, or mean, or whatever. Or "flirty" or anything like this. Ever. Seriously - get a textbook on developmental psychology or neurology. If someone labels their infant or even their toddler with an adult emotion or thought process of any kind, you must know that it is the parent projecting something in their own minds onto that baby. Rescue that baby - get that parent the psychological and emotional help they so sorely need, before a child's life becomes a confusing nightmare of mixed messages and having to lie, out of a misplaced sense of loyalty (the child knows it needs the parents to survive - children are by default loyal and loving to their parents, however hateful or abusive the parents are!), to protect the reputations of their parents, to keep their pain-giving family intact. Because that child loves them. Arguably, it shouldn't. But it has to - to survive.
If anyone knows another decent (and more recent) book that depicts a realistic abuser like this mother (and specifically mothers - people are always keen to bad-mouth the bad dads, and are more often than not Mabel-esque in their unwillingness to impart the same apparent motives to mothers! There are a LOT of BAD MOTHERS out there who exploit this loophole!), please let me know. I might not be in the mood to read it any time soon, myself. But there might be a Shari looking for exactly this sort of mirror, to make sense of her own lonely, tortured, broken-hearted existence.
EDIT: I forgot there were so few other reviews on this, and I didn't mention anything about the birding aspect of this one: minimal. Shari likes sparrow hawks, shows Mrs. Wallace a bald eagle's nest, also dislikes blue jays (bullies). Black-capped chickadees, territorial wrens, swallows and a catbird are all I remember her mentioning, and somewhat in passing. The friendship between Mrs. Wallace and Shari is initially predicated on their shared interest in birding, and Mrs. Wallace is considering enlisting as a 'bander' (tagging migratory birds), only she's not sure she can do it alone. There's only a little on this, and all speculative, because whether or not they actually get involved in the banding program or not falls outside the confines of this rather short story, which is mostly focussed on the relationships between Shari, her awful mother, her youngest brother, and Mabel and Mrs. Wallace (and father Zeke, when he's not on the road).
Let me tell you something, credulous people with a need to believe in the infalliability of mothers: you are complicit in the abuse of their children when you refuse to entertain the possibility that the friendly woman who makes you feel nice about yourself or somehow reassured that the world isn't a terrible place or something, isn't an manipulative, two-faced, lying psychopath at home. (A big F U to every "well-meaning" brainless twit who has told an abused child that their mother "really loves them, trust me". You don't know anything aside from what you already want to perceive, coupled with the image that the mother wants you to see, and, not coincidentally, that mother can tell you're ready and willing to see only the good, to believe she's a saint, long-suffering saint with awful children that she loves anyway, while later the same day she finds new ways to physically, emotionally and sometimes sexually torture her kids on the high she got pulling the wool over your fool eyes. You are COMPLICIT in that abuse, if you reassure her kids that she loves them. You cannot actually know if she does or if she just pretends to when people are present. Know that.).
Wow, I needed to vent that. And maybe you needed to read that.
Too many people assume a friendly woman = a good and loving mother. THERE IS NO SUCH EQUIVALENCY, AND YOU SHOULD NEVER MAKE SUCH A FOOLISH ASSUMPTION. Only the child knows. You don't. Psychopaths can spot a warm-hearted, naive patsy a mile away. Do the children of the world a favour - ask yourself if you're that patsy. Are you too willing to believe that you don't know a mother who extinguishes cigarettes on their child's skin in places you don't see? Who locks them out of the house at night to fend for themselves, to teach them a lesson? Who slanders them and ruins their reputation to all and sundry? Who can't stand to see the child feel happy? Secure? Comfortable? Confident? These mothers exist. Ask me how I know.
C. S. Adler must've known one or two of them, too, when she wrote this. It's not a great book, to be honest - it takes awhile to get going, and I found her scene setting to be lacking (I'm big on that, though). Lots of awful typos like "story" for 'store', and missing quotation marks, and question marks where other punctuation would have made more sense. Characters are pretty flat, though Charlotte hits virtually all of the high notes of a stereotypical abusive mother.
Shari is the eldest of four children, all the rest boys, and lives in rural Vermont with her young and maladjusted high-school drop-out mother, Charlotte, who had 3 kids before she was 20; and their long-haul trucking absentee father, Zeke. Shari has no friends. Shari has no pets (Charlotte set free Shari's parakeet - Charlotte doesn't like animals). Shari spends most of her time babysitting her youngest brother, 6 year old Petey (Pete). In fact, 13 year old Shari is functionally his ersatz mother, even charged with helping him to urinate cleanly into the toilet. Much is expected of lonely, shy, friendless Shari, who her hateful loser mother refers to as "Shari Ape Face" while she harrangues and berates her into doing the majority of the household chores. Charlotte hasn't a single redeeming quality.
"I should have known better than to trust you with him. You've always been a rotten mean kid since the day you were born. Never a smile out of you. Never a hug or a kiss. Soon as you could walk, you ran away from me, never to me, always away. I thought you had feelings for him at least, but you let him fall down that ravine, and if he dies, you just better believe it was you who killed him."What kind of a baby runs away from its mother? Only one - a scared one. It goes against every basic mammalian hindbrain survival skill to turn from your mother. It takes a lot, a LOT, of abuse to cause any behaviour remotely resembling this. And who's to say it isn't all Charlotte's delusion anyway? Babies are too simple to think or be anything but helpless infants. Anyone who believes differently is deluded, and dangerously so.
And back to my big F U to the well-meaning, kind-hearted accomplice, who (hopefully) knows not the immense damage they cause, here's lovely Mabel, the local grocer. A nice lady, but a moron:
"This child comes from a perfectly good family. I've known her mother all her life. She's not a bad woman. Maybe Charlotte's grandparents was stricter than they should've been and kept her at home and protected her overmuch. Then she got herself a husband who did the same, until he decided to go off on the road and leave her in charge of four growing kids, which is more than her nerves can stand-"Remember: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Also, all she knows is of her own experiences of Charlotte, not those of Charlotte's kids.
Where do people like Mabel come from? Who knows. But a further passage helped give me pause for thought. More from Mabel:
"Sometimes," she said kindly, "when a parent gets riled, they strike out at whoever's around. My papa used to backhand us every once in a while, hit us so hard our ears would ring, and he'd keep on walking just like he'd never done a thing. It taught us to be careful how we acted around him, but he didn't mean us no harm. Just wanted to see we were brought up good and proper.That's cognitive dissonance. If you agree with Mabel, let me tell you something: you are lying to yourself because you can't face the truth of your parents not loving you completely... or possibly at all. Get help if so - you deserve it, and it might also prevent you from being complicit in the abuse of another innocent.
"You got to be a good child and help her and maybe not go running off in the woods all the time like she complains you do."Mabel - you might be kind-hearted. But you're an imbecile.
How about mother Charlotte, again?
"Sit down," Charlotte said. "I'm not going to hit you. I only got mad at your because you let Peter hurt himself. Don't start pretending to be scared of me all of a sudden. You've never been scared of me in your life."Telling kids what their thoughts should be or are ('You've never been scared of me in your life' - how the f would she know?! That's not for her to decide), complaining that a baby didn't cry, wasn't human?! It's obvious, right? (If it isn't, get ye to a competent psychologist and ask them what they think. I dare you). ;)
"I don't like getting hit," Shari said.
"I didn't hit you. A slap once in a while isn't hitting. And you don't feel it anyway. Don't feel nothing, never did. Even when you were tiny, you didn't cry. I used to wonder if you were human, the way nothing seemed to hurt you."
Here's Shari's mother, speaking to Shari, about her pregnancy with Shari:
"If he'd have given me the money to have an abortion like I wanted instead of marrying me, it would've worked out better."and
"Don't you dare go to that woman. We're your family here. We're your family and you belong with us."
"But I don't," Shari said. "You told me yourself I don't belong to anybody here except you, and you hate me." She was flying, flying over the abyss, amazed at her own recklessness.
"Run, Shari," Walter yelled.
Mrs. Wallace, a widowed grandmother living on her own in a cabin up a mountainous backroad, soon becomes Shari's best friend (her words. Her only friend, as it happens, but she's not a bad choice at all). This is who she runs to, though is smart enough to hide out in the woods for several hours, first. Mrs. Wallace is a fellow bird-lover, and is observational in many ways:
"You know," Mrs. Wallace said, "my good friend Mabel believes that every mother loves her child and that it's a child's duty to love her back. Do you think Mabel's right?"
"I don't know." It was the kind of subject she avoided thinking about. She looked at Mrs. Wallace, who was patiently waiting for an answer. For her sake, Shari tried. "Sometimes you just can't love somebody. And I guess some children aren't very lovable. I guess . . . I don't know."
"Well, I do," Mrs. Wallace said. "I've seen mothers who don't love their children and some who seem to pick on one particular child in a mean way. It can also happen that a mother doesn't have much love in her to give. And sometimes a mother and child don't fit well together and get on each other's nerves. It's not that the child is bad, or even that the mother is, it's just that they can't get along well living together. It's remarkable how little most families are like our ideal of how they should be."
I have immense gratitude that people like Mrs. Eve Wallace exist in the world. They only make the Charlotte-types angry, though, and annoy the Mabel-types who avoid allllll confrontation and unpleasantness, even if it means children are abused. Mabel is a coward. Society needs less Mabels. The Mabels of society help shelter the Charlottes, who, of course, wouldn't get away with it, were it not for the Mabels. Don't be a Mabel.
I feel like this review has gotten much more personal than it needed to be, but it was that sort of book - not a good one, but maybe an important one. The right book for an abused girl. I wish I had read it at Shari's age, anyway.
She looked at her mother calmly. Never before in her life had she felt as free of Charlotte. If it wasn't Shari's fault, if it was just Charlotte's nature to be mean, then Shari owed her mother nothing. No need to fear her any more. With nothing due and nothing to expect, the bond between them was broken.
I would just like to close by saying no baby is capable of being cold, or mean, or whatever. Or "flirty" or anything like this. Ever. Seriously - get a textbook on developmental psychology or neurology. If someone labels their infant or even their toddler with an adult emotion or thought process of any kind, you must know that it is the parent projecting something in their own minds onto that baby. Rescue that baby - get that parent the psychological and emotional help they so sorely need, before a child's life becomes a confusing nightmare of mixed messages and having to lie, out of a misplaced sense of loyalty (the child knows it needs the parents to survive - children are by default loyal and loving to their parents, however hateful or abusive the parents are!), to protect the reputations of their parents, to keep their pain-giving family intact. Because that child loves them. Arguably, it shouldn't. But it has to - to survive.
If anyone knows another decent (and more recent) book that depicts a realistic abuser like this mother (and specifically mothers - people are always keen to bad-mouth the bad dads, and are more often than not Mabel-esque in their unwillingness to impart the same apparent motives to mothers! There are a LOT of BAD MOTHERS out there who exploit this loophole!), please let me know. I might not be in the mood to read it any time soon, myself. But there might be a Shari looking for exactly this sort of mirror, to make sense of her own lonely, tortured, broken-hearted existence.
EDIT: I forgot there were so few other reviews on this, and I didn't mention anything about the birding aspect of this one: minimal. Shari likes sparrow hawks, shows Mrs. Wallace a bald eagle's nest, also dislikes blue jays (bullies). Black-capped chickadees, territorial wrens, swallows and a catbird are all I remember her mentioning, and somewhat in passing. The friendship between Mrs. Wallace and Shari is initially predicated on their shared interest in birding, and Mrs. Wallace is considering enlisting as a 'bander' (tagging migratory birds), only she's not sure she can do it alone. There's only a little on this, and all speculative, because whether or not they actually get involved in the banding program or not falls outside the confines of this rather short story, which is mostly focussed on the relationships between Shari, her awful mother, her youngest brother, and Mabel and Mrs. Wallace (and father Zeke, when he's not on the road).
September 16, 2012
An abused 13-yr-old girl finds comfort in an elderly woman as a terrifying accident and a secret from the past threaten to tear apart her family.
March 2, 2016
C-. children's fiction, contemporary, mom's stash, discard
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews